Criminal Chinese Gangs Run Thousands of US Marijuana Farms
By M Dowling
Recently, Chinese criminal gangsters had a shootout on a marijuana farm on the prairie in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma. Pro Publica reports that they’ve taken over the illicit marijuana trade in Oklahoma. It doesn’t stop there. They run illegal farms throughout the US and commit all manner of crimes.
“The profits from the marijuana trade allow the Chinese organized criminal networks to expand their underground global banking system for cartels and other criminal organizations,” said Im, who was an architect of the DEA’s fight against Chinese organized crime.
According to a Pro Publica and The Frontier investigation, Chinese organized gangs from California to Maine dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade. The criminal industry is exploding in growth.
The gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage, and theft of water and electricity, the report states further.
Traffickers also force Chinese immigrant women into prostitution for the bosses of the agricultural workforce.
According to state and federal officials, the mobsters operate in a loose but disciplined confederation overseen from New York by mafias rooted in southern China. These criminal gangs wield power at home and throughout their international organizations and allegedly maintain an alliance with the Chinese state, Pro Publica reports.
Read the frightening details of what this investigation turned up at Pro Publica.
According to Politico, a Department of Homeland Security memo first reported by the Daily Caller, received as part of a Freedom of Information Act request, said that Chinese nationals operated more than 270 unlicensed cannabis cultivation sites in Maine.
According to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors, these gangs are called Triads. The Chinese Communist Party allows them to operate, but they don’t control them.